Leap on Consequences of Harsh Gang Laws

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Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Jorja Leap spoke to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the impact of harsh gang laws in Georgia. Maurice Franklin, a 28-year-old father of four with no felony record or prior accusations of violence, is being held without bond after the victim of a drive-by shooting found his Facebook page and said she recognized him. Franklin faces up to 760 years in prison if convicted, despite having multiple alibi witnesses at the time of the crime, which  injured no one. The charges were increased because authorities allege the shooting was gang-related; Franklin denies that he is a gang member or had anything to do with the drive-by shooting. According to Leap, “heavy-handed charging decisions like that haven’t been shown to drive down crime.” She explained that cases like this one can also lead to further mistrust of police, particularly in communities of color. “I think this is a tragic case of prosecutorial overreach,” Leap said.

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LPPI Team Finds Mobilization of Latino Vote

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Sonja Diaz, Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas and Daisy Vazquez Vera of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative joined Latino Rebels Radio to discuss the findings of their new report on the role of Latino voters in the 2020 election. In a path-breaking study building on research from 2018, the LPPI team collected and analyzed precinct data, which represents actual election results instead of polls or predictions. The LPPI report estimated that a historic 16.6 million U.S. Latinos voted in the 2020 election, a 30.9% increase from 2016. “Either by themselves or in a multi-racial coalition, Latinos delivered many states for Joe Biden, including Arizona and Georgia,” the report’s authors found. The team explained that Latino voters have historically been “invisible for a variety of structural reasons,” and they aimed to find empirical evidence of the impact of Latino voters across the country with the quantitative report.

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Yaroslavsky on Frustrations Over Vaccine Rollout

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Los Angeles Initiative Director Zev Yaroslavsky spoke to the Daily Breeze about frustrations surrounding Los Angeles County’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout. While thousands of people were able to sign up to receive the vaccine, many were blocked, battling a severely limited supply, extraordinary demand for the available slots and a flurry of technical challenges. Yaroslavsky said much of the confusion stems from muddled messaging from federal, state and local authorities. “There’s been a total communication failure on the part of all levels of government,” he said. “To the average person … not savvy to the jurisdictional issues, they are just saying, ‘What are the rules?’ and ‘Hey, I’m 70 years old. Am I eligible or not eligible? The next day I hear something else from my local officials,’ ” Yaroslavsky said. “Everybody’s culpable on this, starting with the White House on down, and hopefully this is going to change in the days ahead with the new leadership.”

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Holloway on Slow Uptake of HIV Prevention Medication

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Associate Professor of Social Welfare Ian Holloway was featured in an Instinct Magazine piece about a multi-year study of PrEP familiarity and use among gay and bisexual men. PrEP, a preventative medicine for people at risk for HIV, can be highly effective when taken as prescribed. Holloway’s study found that while gay and bisexual men are more familiar with PrEP than in the past, many are still not using the medicine. “We are heartened to see an increase in PrEP familiarity in this relatively short period of time,” said Holloway, faculty director of the Gay Sexuality and Social Policy Initiative at UCLA Luskin. “But growth in favorable attitudes was modest, as was the increase in PrEP use among sexually active gay and bisexual men.” Looking forward, Holloway hopes to learn more about why PrEP use is still not very popular among at-risk men. The research was also featured in media outlets including Out and Edge.

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Astor Links ‘Opportunity Structures’ to School Safety and Equity

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor co-authored an article for School Psychology Review that delineates the need for new studies on how opportunity structures — factors such as geographic location, gender, race, religion, nationality, ethnicity and family background — influence and shape patterns that impact school safety, school climate and bullying. The concept of opportunity structures has historically been used to study equity in the labor market. In education, it has been used to describe systemic racism in educational inequality. The authors apply school-centered ecological theory as a conceptual framework that links opportunity structures and school safety. They recommend further research on communities and families, creating positive school cultures and climates, and different types of educator bias that restrict opportunities and result in less safe environments. Astor, the Crump Professor of Social Welfare at UCLA Luskin, also holds an appointment with the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. His work examines the role of the physical, social-organizational and cultural contexts in schools related to different kinds of bullying and school violence, including sexual harassment, cyberbullying, discrimination hate acts, school fights, emotional abuse, weapon use and teacher-child violence. Astor’s co-authors are Pedro Noguera, dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education; Temple University Associate Professor Edward Fergus; University of Pennsylvania Professor Vivian L. Gadsden; and Rami Benbenishty, professor emeritus at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. — Joanie Harmon

Leap on the Underpinnings of Increased Gun Violence

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Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Jorja Leap spoke to LAist about a recent increase in gun violence in South Los Angeles. Violent crime has spiked across the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, and gang intervention workers have identified contributing factors including the economic and social stresses of the pandemic, distrust between the community and law enforcement in the wake of police shootings, social media and drugs. “It is not a law enforcement problem, it is a public safety problem,” Leap said. In an analysis of LAPD’s Community Safety Partnership program, Leap highlighted the jurisdictional challenges of violence intervention, where different parts of the same streets are monitored by different police departments. “This is multifaceted. The old ways of doing things are not going to work, and it’s never going to be solved by simply putting cops [in hotspots],” she said. “If anything, sometimes that heightens the issues.”

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Storper on Quality of Life in State Capitals

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Michael Storper, distinguished professor of regional and international development in urban planning, was featured in a WalletHub article comparing affordability, access to education and overall quality of life in U.S. state capitals. Storper explained that the “tradition in America is to separate political capitals from major cultural or economic capitals.” As a result, many state capitals benefit from local economic stability but lack business, buzz and technological energy. However, Storper pointed out that Austin, Texas, is a notable exception as a capital with a major university hub, a gigantic tech hub, and a big music and creativity hub. Using 44 different indicators, WalletHub ranked all 50 cities and concluded that Austin ranked highest overall. Storper called Austin a “superstar metro in its own right.” However, he concluded that state capitals “don’t offer much that is particularly advantageous, except maybe relatively low land and cost of living compared to the principal cities.”

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Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon Opens UCLA Luskin Summit Legislative priorities relating to police reform and climate change are topics of focus in the keynote webinar to begin the third annual conference

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By Les Dunseith

California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon spoke about California’s policy priorities during remarks Jan. 28 when the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs opened its third annual Luskin Summit.

As one of the state’s top political leaders, Rendon outlined his legislative priorities for 2021 — police reform, climate change and broadband internet access —  as the first presenter in a virtual series of discussions set to continue in February, March and April.

Dean Gary Segura said Rendon was invited to open the Summit in part because his background and political views are of interest to UCLA students, faculty and alumni. “In his career as educator, child well-being advocate and policy innovator, Rendon represents the best values of the Luskin School and our mission.”

Addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, Rendon, a Democrat, said Californians are already seeing benefits from the election of Joe Biden as president.

“One thing we can be sure about is the importance of having a plan. Throughout 2020, when COVID first appeared on our radar, we did not have a national plan,” Rendon said. “Biden came in, and he released a plan in his first week.”

He noted the tension that existed on many issues between the Trump administration and California officials, which led state leaders to work independently of the federal government on issues such as immigration and climate change.

“With Biden in the White House … I think we’re going to have a little bit more help and more opportunities to work with this administration instead of against it,” Rendon said.

As a legislative leader, Rendon has stressed inclusion and diversity, and he noted that more women hold committee chairs today in the state assembly than at any time in the past. He also pointed to his appointment of the first Muslim, Imam Mohammad Yasir Khan, to serve as assembly chaplain.

His leadership style emphasizes sharing of responsibility, Rendon told the online audience of more than 100 scholars, social services advocates, philanthropic and public leaders, and other interested parties. 

“I believe that the assembly works best when the individual members of the assembly, particularly the chairs, are able to utilize their skills, to utilize their life experiences,” he said. For example, Rendon said he has sought to embolden the chairs of legislative committees related to health and education whose expertise exceeds his own. “That’s been my philosophy, that I can be the best leader if I’m enabling others to do their jobs.”

In terms of legislative priorities, Rendon acknowledged that California lawmakers “fell short” on police reform in 2020, including failing to pass a bill that would have changed the disciplinary processes for police officers.

“We need to change those processes so that public safety is not just about officer protection,” he said. “Of course, we want to make sure that we’re not endangering the people we trust with patrolling our streets and neighborhoods, but we also have to make sure that they are careful.”

Rendon said California is already a national and international leader in dealing with climate change, but more work can be done.

“We need to ask if our climate change actions benefit disadvantaged communities,” he said, noting that his assembly district includes some of the most densely populated areas in the nation. “Southeast L.A. communities have around 17,000 people per square mile, but we have severe park shortages.”

Parts of his district were once farmland, but when they were developed for housing, the emphasis was placed on building high-density apartment dwellings without retaining open spaces. “Parks and vegetation are really important ways to reduce the heat island effect that drives warming in urban communities,” Rendon said.

His third legislative priority for 2021 also focuses on disadvantaged communities. In the past, discussions about a lack of broadband internet access centered around rural communities in the extreme north and south of the state.

“When COVID happened and when folks started having to go online for schooling, we discovered that there was a lack of broadband access all over the place,” Rendon said. “And those problems really started to manifest themselves, particularly in disadvantaged communities.”

He views the internet today as a critical public utility. “It’s not just a rich and poor issue; not just an urban and rural issue,” Rendon said. “It’s an issue that affects every single part of the state.”

In answer to a question posed by Segura about housing affordability, Rendon talked about visiting a neighborhood where he had once lived and noticing a flurry of housing construction. He reached out to a local official to praise the effort, only to be told to take a closer look at the upper floors of the newly occupied buildings.

“Those are all dark, right? Nobody lives there.”

In Rendon’s view, this example illustrates an ongoing problem in a state in which high-end housing continues to be built without enough pressure being brought on developers to balance their projects with affordable units.

When he first got to Sacramento, Rendon said, he noticed a disconnect in people’s minds between housing and homelessness. Over time, this misconception has slowly changed, in part because of “incredible data that show the number of people who would become homeless if they missed one month of pay, if they missed two months of pay.”

To further illustrate his point, Rendon noted that as assembly speaker he serves on the UC Board of Regents and the Cal State Board of Trustees. The statistics on housing scarcity among university students are staggering, he said, noting that many students can be found sleeping in their cars or couch surfing with friends from one night to the next.

“We know that housing and homelessness are linked,” said Rendon, whose 20 years of work in the nonprofit sphere often leads him to look for solutions in service delivery mechanisms. “I think if we’re going to solve the housing crisis, we need to address homelessness. And if we’re going to address homelessness, we really need to think about comprehensive services for homeless folks and for near-homeless folks.”

Additional information about the Luskin Summit, including previews of other sessions and a registration link, can be found online. Sponsors include the Los Angeles Rams, Gensler, the Weingart Foundation and the California Wellness Foundation. The media partner is ABC7 in Los Angeles.

In late April, the final event of Luskin Summit 2021 will be unveiling of the 6th annual Quality of Life Index, a project at UCLA Luskin that is supported by The California Endowment and Meyer and Renee Luskin under the direction of Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative. The survey asks county residents to rate their quality of life in a range of categories and to answer questions about important issues. Last year’s survey happened to coincide with the early stages of the pandemic.  

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Latino Voters Were Decisive in 2020 Presidential Election

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A new report by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative shows that Latino voters were decisive in sending President-elect Joe Biden to the White House. Researchers analyzed votes cast in 13 states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin — that collectively are home to about 80% of the Latino electorate. Researchers estimated that nationwide Latino voter turnout increased 30.9% compared with the 2016 presidential election. Among voters of all races, turnout was 15.9% greater. The impact of the growing Latino electorate was evident in battleground states. In Arizona, where Latinos represent 25.2% of all registered voters, the electorate’s size and turnout helped secure Biden’s victory. Even in Wisconsin and Georgia, where Latinos make up less than 5% of registered voters, their strong support of the Democratic candidate helped tip the scales to victory by margins of less than a single percentage point. The report also provides context for a prominent post-election talking point. Many observers said that results in Miami-Dade County, Florida — where Trump got support from a majority of Latino voters — was evidence of a wider Latino swing toward the president. Trump did win the state, but the UCLA report found that in all Florida counties outside of Miami-Dade, Latino voters favored Biden by a margin of 2 to 1. By looking at votes cast and demographic data at the precinct level, the report offers a more accurate analysis of the impact of Latino voters than other studies that have relied on exit polls, which do not capture enough Latino voters.

Tilly on Barriers Facing Union Organizing in Tech

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Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly spoke to KQED about the obstacles facing Silicon Valley workers who want to unionize. In recent years, tech employees have protested lack of diversity, mishandling of sexual harassment claims, and the second-class treatment of temporary workers and contractors. White-collar tech employees recently formed Alphabet Workers Union at the parent company of Google. According to Tilly, Silicon Valley companies such as Google have done a lot to make it difficult for workers to form unions. “There are a lot of barriers to building worker solidarity within Google,” he said. “Google and other tech companies have been effective at fissuring workers, hiring some as contractors, others as temps and also outsourcing labor around the globe,” Tilly explained. Workers are physically separated and have different employment statuses, including different wage and benefit packages, making it difficult to organize them around common goals.

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